On Dec. 25, the White Army e-mailed a statement vowing to “wipe out the entire Murle tribe on the face of the earth.”
The next day, 6,000 Lou Nuer fighters attacked Likuangole.
South Sudan map: Likuangole; Jonglei state; Pibor; Duk Padiet; Likuangole; Nuer tribe; Murle tribe
They stole thousands of heads of cattle. They destroyed all the boreholes, eliminating the main source of water here. Groups of warriors targeted Murle men, while others tracked down women and children who had fled into the thick bush.
Kayoi Maze, 42, was separated from her two daughters, ages 18 and 16. Her neighbors later told her that the fighters had abducted them.
“I don’t expect to ever see them again,” said Maze, who like hundreds of villagers returned to Likuangole to receive aid from the U.N. World Food Program. “At least I have two daughters left.”
Local officials estimate that 850 people were killed in Likuangole and nearby villages, including 660 women and children. An estimated 150 women and children were abducted. An additional 2,250 people were killed in surrounding areas. But neither the United Nations nor the government have confirmed those figures.
In Likuangole, two human skulls lie on a patch of charred ground near the U.N. base. The smell of rotting flesh still wafts through the air. In graffiti covering the walls of the school, the Lou Nuer fighters have declared the town part of their territory.
“We have done this to you,” reads one message, “because you have done it to us.”
‘The U.N. failed us’
When the gunmen attacked, Achiro Manibon remembered running in one direction as his three wives and four children ran the other way. They were all shot dead.
Manibon, 35, had expected the United Nations combat force and South Sudanese troops stationed in the town to fend off the attackers. But they didn’t fire a weapon, he said. Across this area, people feel betrayed by their military and the U.N. peacekeepers, which has a mandate to use force, if needed, to protect civilians.
For weeks, the peacekeepers had tracked columns of Lou Nuer fighters making their way toward Likuangole and Pibor. Yet they dispatched only 400 of their 3,000-member force.
Simon Ali, a local administrator, said he brought five disabled people to the U.N. base for protection. The peacekeepers told him to put them in a hut about five yards from the base, he said. When the Lou Nuer arrived, they fired into the hut. Then, they torched it with the people inside, Ali said.
“The U.N. failed us,” he said. “We asked for their help and they did nothing.”
Johnson, the head of the U.N. mission in South Sudan, said U.N. forces in Likuangole had evacuated 41 people, mostly disabled and elderly, before the attack, “but we cannot rule out there might have been some civilians left.” She added that she was not aware of any incidents in which U.N. forces did not provide assistance to civilians seeking refuge.
In Likuangole, there’s also deep mistrust of the government. Many senior officials, including Vice President Reik Machar, are Nuer, and Lou Nuer soldiers number in the thousands in the military and are unlikely to intervene, residents said.
Col. Philip Aguer, a South Sudanese military spokesman, said that only 500 soldiers were in Likuangole at the time of the attack, and that it would have been like “sentencing your soldiers to death” if they had tried to fight the 6,000 Lou Nuer warriors.
“The real reason why they did nothing is because the force was not capable of confronting the attackers,” Aguer said. “Not because many are Nuer.”
Today, roughly 1,500 U.N. peacekeepers — half the force — are patrolling Jonglei state. But it has become even more difficult to stop attacks. The Murle fighters are moving in small groups, staging swift stealth attacks, making the violence harder to monitor and predict. “You could see a pattern of where they are moving, but we, with all our helicopters, are not able to detect that they are going to that village or not that,” Johnson said.
Back in the United States, Gai Bol Thong is continuing to raise funds for the White Army. If the government cannot protect the Nuer community, “we will do some revenge against the Murle,” he warned.
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